


you take more than you need

by Randstad



Category: DCU, The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-29
Updated: 2015-01-29
Packaged: 2018-03-09 13:46:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3252062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Randstad/pseuds/Randstad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harrison likes his sacrifices to be both intentional and necessary. Unfortunately, his affair with Hartley Rathaway is neither.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you take more than you need

**Author's Note:**

> Unedited! I need an editor! Or maybe an adult!

His most esteemed pupil doesn’t have to work late if he doesn’t want to. Hartley may have been kicked out by his former benefactors, the parents who should have loved him and instead turned him away, but the checks he pulls from S.T.A.R. Labs are enough to sustain him even without overtime bonuses. And he has enough of an active social life that he typically leaves on time, early enough to taste Central City’s nightlife—whatever that means for him.

Which is why it’s unusual for Harrison to spot Hartley in the breakroom so late, just as Harrison—always the last to leave—exits his dotted room, leaves behind a carefully concealed yellow suit and his cloudy mirror that reflects the future. He’s about to shut down the facility and leave open only custodial access when the tuft of brown-red hair catches his eye, the head bent over a fresh cup of coffee, the typically prim shoulders hunched and tired.

"Hartley?"

The boy startles. "Doctor Wells!" he says. "I didn’t know you were still here."

Harrison shrugs, makes his way further inside. "Friday nights are some of my most productive," he says. "Usually because everyone leaves early." He gestures at the coffee pot, the stooped shoulders that have yet to rediscover Hartley’s usual grace. "If I recall correctly, you’re usually a stickler for timely departures yourself, aren’t you?"

"Yes—usually. I—" He seems harassed already, the poor guy; he rubs a tired hand over his face, and the truth spills out from beneath his palm. "My parents have returned from a ... six-month excursion overseas." Ah. Their tour through the west. "People tend to show up at my apartment when they do. As if there’s a correlation between ..."

Between how newsworthy Hartley Rathaway is and whether or not he and his parents inhabit the same continent. Harrison nods. He knows notoriety well enough to know its pitfalls. "Surely they won’t stay there all night."

"Probably not," Hartley concedes, but he doesn’t move from where he is. 

It’s easy to forget, for most of their mutual colleagues, that Hartley has barely scraped his way out of his teens, has recently been disowned. His nose is perpetually just above the waters of scandal, and he doesn’t bother to make friends who could keep him afloat. 

Harrison steps inside the breakroom and reaches into the cabinets. He pulls out a mug and pours himself some coffee. "Well, for tonight at least, there’s no more work to be done."

"Doctor ... Harrison." The boy suppresses a sigh and then turns to face him fully. "I do apologize. I just—"

He raises his cup to his own lips, blows short and quick over the top. "Which I suppose only leaves play."

There’s a ghost of a suspicion that Harrison has had for awhile now, and a perfect moment where it claws its way to the fore of his thoughts—Hartley pauses. And then he shakes himself. "I beg your pardon?" he says evasively.

Harrison takes a sip of his coffee and checks his watch. "It’s still early," he says. "I could go a few rounds on the board."

Hartley’s dark eyes flick down, and there’s a glimmer of a smirk in the corner of his mouth, the dry self-deprecation of a man who doesn’t like when his hypotheses are in fact Hail Marys. "A game of chess hardly seems like a worthy use of your Friday night."

"I can’t think of a worthier use than keeping your company, Hartley," Harrison says, and he really does mean it, not that it would matter. Not that it would affect the way a smile blooms on Hartley’s face, unexpectedly sweet, before he strides past Harrison to pull their chessboard from one of the side rooms where he likes to keep it hidden from view.  


  


-  


  


The breakroom air conditioner, as it turns out, has been only a third of the way functional for a few weeks now. Harrison wouldn’t have known if Hartley hadn’t chosen to flee his home to stay in his other sanctuary: the S.T.A.R. Labs halls that he knows better than his own family by now, the walls that are more important to him than the people inside.

But there are other reasons Harrison plays tonight’s game in his shirtsleeves, and it has a lot to do with scientific curiosity. He can see, when he toys idly with a rook, the way Hartley’s eyes seem drawn to skin. The weight of his gaze is a prickle on the inside of Harrison’s forearm, the wrist beneath his Breguet watch, the tasteful open fold of his collar. As the minutes pass Hartley’s discomfort seems to nurture itself in silence.

Harrison wins the first round so he can turn over the next to Hartley, who knocks over the last piece and says, "I don’t need your pity, Harrison."

"Good, because people who know me know I’m in rather short supply."

He reaches over to reset the board while Hartley stands up to refill his coffee, his mouth turned downward at the corners now like he can’t function on good will alone.

"You’re always welcome here," Harrison continues over the soft clack of wooden pieces. "Before hours, after hours. If you’re committed to this lab then you should consider it a home as often as necessary, maybe always."

"Not everyone feels that way," Hartley murmurs as he stirs his coffee.

It’s a peculiar moment of self-awareness for the kid, rare enough to perhaps be rewarded. Harrison rises. He trails a thoughtful hand on the circular tabletop as he passes by the board and the seats, and then suddenly they’re close, crowded near the coffeemaker, partners in work and now in shared air. "Well, _I’m_ glad you’re here," Harrison says firmly, like he has a commitment to comfort. "That’s all that matters."

A distance of a foot or less between the self and another is, in a word, intrusive. But Hartley doesn’t move. Can’t seem to tear his eyes away from Harrison’s. He’s stiff as a board all over, and his lips are shut and bloodless like he’s afraid of what could come out of them, what they could do.

And Harrison, well—he’s a man with wants. People always seem surprised that he eats, sleeps, has ventures outside of the realm of the scientific. That the body beneath his suits and slackened finery runs on blood and bone.

He hesitates, then raises his hand to Hartley’s jaw, a delicate touch that would be easy to bat away. The room is quiet enough that he can hear Hartley’s sudden low intake of breath; the room is just well-lit enough that Harrison can see the shadows in his eyes take root.

"I’ve never," Hartley starts abruptly, then stops, annoyed and embarrassed. There isn’t much that can detract from the patrician dignity that runs hot in his blood, but Harrison likes to be an exception to basic rules.

He pulls his hand back and smiles, embarrassed himself—he’s abrasive, sure, but never to his most valued colleagues. His closest friends. "Of course, of course," he says. "My apologies, that was probably a bit forward ..."

Hartley impatiently swats aside air, or maybe the rest of Harrison’s politely guarded dismay. "That’s not what I wanted to say."

Harrison lets the silence rest between them. If he listens closely there’s the hum of machinery below their feet, behind the wall at his back.

If Hartley is in real distress it comes incrementally; his careful poise disrupts itself. His fingertips rub against one another over and over, and his eyes beneath his glasses are shuttered. A minute passes, maybe two, until Hartley’s expression assumes some finality: he takes off his glasses and rests them and his coffee cup on the linoleum counter behind him.

And then they’re kissing, sudden as a clap of thunder, Hartley’s mouth aggressive and hot and yielding all at once to a point where Harrison earnestly can’t tell if he wants to devour or be devoured. His kiss is hard enough to bruise, with an urgent sweetness that leaks from his throat in soft and near-soundless whimpers; his feet stumble like he can’t decide whether he wants to push Harrison down or be pushed down himself, take or be taken.

He’s smart, and rarely this indecisive. Harrison has no choice but to make the decision for him: another stifled cry pulls itself from Hartley’s mouth when his back hits the counter, when he’s pressed down, shoulder jammed up against a paper towel dispenser in Harrison’s hurry to slide one hand up Hartley’s pressed shirt, to take his chin in-hand and guide him forcefully, guide his own tongue deeper into that starved mouth so he can feed.

"Fuck," Hartley breathes. It’s unlike him to be vulgar, which is why Harrison kisses him more deeply, hums in approval at the _fuck, fuck, fuck_ that follows. The hot swell of his erection beneath his mohair trousers, where Harrison can feel it firm against his waist, is so sudden as to seem almost adolescent—but it’s the whispered _Harrison, fuck, if you don’t I swear I’ll_ that finally affirms Harrison’s first hypothesis. That Hartley wants him. Has probably wanted him since the day they met. Hartley’s interview, when the boy sat across from him with his carefully crossed knee, when he spoke with a confidence that had before seemed coy and Harrison now knows was a touch coquettish. More than overqualified, Harrison had said, and Hartley countered with: Exactly what you need. I can prove it.

He shoves Hartley back onto the counter, as belated punishment for his naivete. Hartley’s shoulders bang hard on the wall, and he laughs with pure delight, hooks an ankle around Harrison’s lower back to reel him in. He doesn’t seem to notice the preternatural strength in Harrison’s arms. Or maybe it’s exactly what he wants, what he’s dreamed about. He scrabbles at the tile, sighs beautifully, sprawls up against the wall like he’d let Harrison fuck him right here in the breakroom.

Which. Far be it from him to look a gift horse in the mouth, but. "... not very hygienic," Harrison says finally through his teeth. Through his grin, where it’s pushed up by Hartley’s throat, beneath the soft skin of his earlobe.

Hartley grunts, a sound that’s half displeasure and half the opposite. "Not like _you_ eat in here."

"There’s a first time for everything," Harrison says mildly, and Hartley’s eyes flare open like two hot coals; he reaches forward with two blind hands and yanks Harrison in closer, _ruts_ , like he can’t stand any place they don’t touch, and Harrison laughs because he has to: because there’s plenty of incredulity to go around.  


  


-  


  


As it turns out, what Hartley meant to say is that he’s never been serious about anyone before, except for a hot-blooded dalliance when he was seventeen that ended in devastation. It’s a story Harrison knows well, though not personally. It was in the papers—the gossip column, the society pages inundated with the greedy words of a boy who didn’t love him enough to keep his secrets. Since then Hartley has kept a lid on his infatuations, keeps his hookups dispassionate and furtive, contained to the hotel rooms of conferences and bar hookups. The whole matter smacks of young adulthood, its pitfalls unavoidable despite Hartley’s implacable maturity. Harrison had skipped it himself. He’d married young.

Or so he says when they’re in Hartley’s bed later. The truth is rarely pure, never simple. Let the boy think he was the first to defile a widower.

"I know," Hartley says after awhile, his grin audible beneath the hoarseness of his voice, " _so many_ people who would kill to be where I am right now."

Harrison hums and cards his hand through the boy’s hair. "An esteemed and essential part of S.T.A.R. Labs?"

"You know what I mean," Hartley huffs, laughs, smug and awed all at once. He can’t see well without his glasses, but that’s only part of why he keeps his face close. His eyes are dark on Harrison’s, like he can unlock whatever sits behind Harrison’s post-coital equanimity with force of will alone. "Harrison."

Harrison smiles down at him, benign. "Yes?"

"We play a lot of games, you and I."

Chess, mostly. Riddles and calculus over email, dry wit jabs over cell phones. "Certainly."

Hartley’s mouth turns down a little at the corners. "I would rather that this wasn’t one of them."

There’s silence in the flat once more. Harrison lets his smile fade of its own accord, and his hand pauses in Hartley’s hair, though it doesn’t stray.

"I don’t want to hurt you, Hartley," Harrison says. It’s opaque, a purposeful open door of a promise. Harrison should know better for a hundred reasons, and yet his home, the now-scattered buttons of his linen shirt, Hartley Rathaway naked with him, they all serve as monuments to his inability to deny himself expensive pleasures.

"I trust you," Hartley says, and he means it so completely that Harrison has to suppress a wince.  


  


-  


  


The way the boy touts himself as Harrison’s favorite, he’s a little worried Hartley will stride into work the next day with a shirt that reads _HARRISON WELLS HAD SEX WITH ME, NOT YOU, HA HA HA_. But Hartley, to his credit, maintains all his threadbare professional tact; he’s no pricklier than usual to their coworkers, and he doesn’t even touch Harrison when they pass in the hall. Harrison’s both relieved and a little sympathetic—it makes sense that he wants his self-appointed appellation to still feel earned, to be owed to his prowess in the lab and not in the sheets.

But he’s perfect there, of course he is, the two of them always in sync whether it’s over quantum computers or in the wide immodest spaces of Hartley’s residence. Harrison is rusty, but even if he wasn’t a quick study Hartley is hungry to educate him; there’s so much Hartley wants from the world, for the world, for himself, and he seems to believe that the gaps between what he wants and the achievable can be covered temporarily by Harrison’s hands and mouth and skin.

Harrison knows temporary fixes when he sees them, but he also knows they can be useful. It’s why he allows it, this affair conducted in the doorways of Hartley’s walk-up in Northside, in Hartley’s bathroom, in his bedroom with the sheet music piled in the corner next to physics journals. He pushes his hands into Hartley’s waist, his shoulders, up against the fine curve of his throat and other places to which he shouldn’t be entitled but somehow is; he dismantles that body so he can make a space for himself inside. 

And Hartley seems livelier for it, when he shows up to work the next day in his business professional and understated Oxfords. He practically whistles as he works. Like he’s as happy to be directed by Harrison here as he was a few hours prior, when he would gasp, and then he would beg. 

Then Francisco Ramon comes to S.T.A.R. Labs, and Hartley’s quality of work declines considerably as Harrison takes time out of his week to get to know their newest hire. Cisco is barely out of his teens just like Hartley was when he joined the labs, with brains and heart for days; he has a future, and even in the limited scope of Harrison’s prescience he already knows it shines.

It also exists in service of his own future, which is why the matter of Hartley’s persistent attitude strikes a nerve. When they pass in the hall Harrison takes the opportunity to shove him into a supply closet, fasten his teeth on that beautiful neck and hiss out, "Do you have a _problem_ , Hartley?" 

A choked noise tears itself from Hartley’s throat, between a growl and a moan. "Well," he says, "not with this, I don’t," and it’s actually genuinely funny that he can muster that attitude now when prior research has demonstrated that he can barely stand when Harrison touches him. Uncanny, what jealousy can do. Uncannier still how he shakes when Harrison pulls at the catch on his trousers, wraps a too-firm hand around his dick.

"I only ever ask that you take me at my word," Harrison mutters. His grip is delicate and then harsh in turns, with the barest graze of short tidy nails over the wet head of Hartley’s cock. The look on Hartley’s face as he bucks into the touch is flushed with both arousal and mutiny, like he can’t decide whether he wants to push Harrison away or shove him down and ride him into the linoleum. The first he’s never done, not once in his entire tenure at the labs. The second he could write a book about, if he felt so inclined. "If I tell you you’re my guy, Hartley ... "

"Oh," Hartley moans, and then the jerk of his hips into Harrison’s hands acquires renewed purpose. Like the words themselves could set him off. "Oh, God. Harrison—"

Then Harrison sees it, the brief pass of a storm over Hartley’s flushed expression, the question in the unhappy corners of his parted mouth that Harrison realizes too late he never planned to answer. He hesitates, and it’s real this time. He cocks his head to the side and lets Hartley fuck his palm futilely for a minute, ever more desperate.

"What does that make you?" he says softly. He would very much like an answer. He has yet to prepare his own.

A tremor ripples from Hartley’s throat down to his unsteady knees. It starts first as a word, though, just one, enough to damn them both. "Yours," he breathes. Breathes into the kiss that follows. "Yours, _yours_ —"

He comes hot and explosive onto Harrison’s hand, his sleeve, the band of his Breguet, and they’re kissing, Harrison drinking deep from the depthless well of his surrender, even though he shouldn’t, should never have, would swear on grave after grave that he never really once set out to break any heart but his own.  


  


-  


  


Whatever happened seems to have placated Hartley’s nerves for now, because the work continues as it always has—perfectly. Soon the accelerator is almost complete. They set a date for the activation. After the work party Hartley and Harrison share a bottle over a rustic table at Rossini’s, after which Harrison takes him to the manor for the first and last time. 

The importance of the gesture isn’t lost on Hartley, though he fails to truly grasp why. He simply looks at the square pillars, the futurist art on the walls, the indoor and outdoor fireplaces, the excess of it all, and says, "You have impeccable taste, Harrison," with a gleam in his eyes because he also means himself. But there’s real reverence in his voice, adoration in how he pulls at Harrison’s clothes later and presses his feverish mouth to Harrison’s skin. There’s a whole reality that glows warm in his eyes and waits to be heard, that Harrison deafens himself to intentionally because he must.

And it’s not that Harrison was never careful with Hartley before, all these dozens upon dozens of times. It’s just that Harrison should be accustomed to goodbyes by now, and yet it never happens; he’s always a little different, a little darker than before.

Which doesn’t bode well, he thinks, for when Barry Allen arrives.  


  


-  


  


If there’s a future where his affair with Hartley Rathaway ends well, Harrison hasn’t seen it. The list of victims of his accelerator explosion don’t end with those who died. Not even those who transformed. 

If someone asked, he’d tell them _no, what I’ve done is not alright, has never been alright, will never be alright_. And he’d mean it. He knows, without pretense, the weight and measure of a human life; he could articulate it if someone asked, just as Blackout did; he knows names and faces and loss. But most people wouldn’t ask, because the only person who has ever really known him for a liar is in a small metal cell.

Harrison visits Hartley a few days after his arrest. Eventually Hartley runs out of steam with which to spit into the cameras and utter the vilest of curses in a dozen languages that Harrison understands to the syllable. His silhouette in the cameras has stilled; the tempest of his fury seems to have abated somewhat, to leave behind clear silent waters for witnesses to distinguish the true shape of his wrath at the bottom. 

But as the cells shift in the facility and draw the incarcerated Hartley to the fore, Harrison from his chair eyes the familiar stoop of his shoulders, the gentle downward slope at the corners of his mouth. He thinks that, perhaps, he miscalculated.

The boy rises to his feet with the wounded grace of an animal shot in the hunt. "Harrison."

"Hello, Hartley," Harrison says. "How are you today?"

"I must say, I’ve been better." His smile is thin and unpleasant. "But that’s my fault. I should be accustomed by now to the way you clean up your messes. Everything disposable until it isn’t."

Directly to the point, then. Harrison folds his hands in his lap and looks down, the picture of understated repentance. "If I treated you as if you were disposable, Hartley, it was in a moment of incredible hubris," he says quietly. "I’d never thought of you that way before that night."

Hartley sniffs, disdainful. "Different words for the same thing." He folds his hands without so much as a wince, despite the fact that the gashes on them are still pink and raw, slow to heal. "It’ll be the same for that Flash of yours, won’t it? Sure, now he’s useful, talented, looks good in leather." And then one of those wounded hands comes up, presses against the glass where Harrison can see the new scars on his wrists in the light. "Tell me, Harrison," he says. "How long do you think he’ll survive the burden of being _your guy_?"

"Hartley." 

He doesn’t mean for it to sound like a warning, he really doesn’t, and maybe that’s his tell, because Hartley barks out a brittle laugh. "So that’s how it is!" he crows, and his hand slams onto the glass pane so he can push himself away, pace, shift on his feet like a tiger at the zoo. "Out with the old, in with the new." His voice is softer now. Harrison envisions the frequency at which it would shatter reinforced glass, render the space between them even more broken.

"That’s not the case." For one, Barry is neither old nor new.

"Then who is he?" Hartley says abruptly. Harrison fixes him with another bland look, but it doesn’t dissuade him as he steps back up to the glass. "Who is he, Harrison?" he repeats, louder still. And then, with a deliberate crook of his head to one side, his eyes sharp enough to pierce: "Who is he to you?" 

The million-dollar question. There’s a demand in the query, unsubtle. _Did you fuck him_ —self-evident. _Do you love him_ , maybe, even though Hartley has never once dealt in the currency of sweet words, even when Harrison knew the touch of that body, its sound and its fury, its dreams laid at Harrison’s feet for him to tread softly upon. 

"He’s gifted," Harrison says. "Like you. And he forgives. Which ... I understand why you do not. What I did to him, what I did to you, to this city ... no one owes me anything, least of all forgiveness. But if I could have it from one person—one person in the _world_ —"

He emphasizes with his hands, lets his voice taper off awkwardly. Ironically, he might still mean Barry. There’s a chance that Hartley knows well enough to know that Harrison doesn’t necessarily mean him, anyway. It’s hard to tell, even for someone like Harrison who reads people with the dispassion of instruction manuals, and it doesn’t help that Hartley fixes him with a level look and then scoffs. 

"You’re fucking unbelievable," Hartley says, and turns away.

And he can’t be dismissed from his own prison, but the stark truth in the air between them makes Harrison defer to Hartley’s desire for solitude: Harrison Wells, whoever he is, will always break a few eggs to make an omelette.  


  


-

  


  
When Harrison comes out of the pipeline he knows Barry is still in the facility. He has a sense for Barry Allen. He’s a compass that always points north.

He turns the corridor and Barry is, sure enough, leaned against one of the desks, his hands shoved gracelessly in his pockets. The look on his face is faintly troubled, but mostly concerned, like he’s afraid another breakout could happen any minute simply so karma can wrap its hands around Harrison’s throat at last. 

"What did you guys talk about?" Barry asks, as nonchalant as he can. Because just as Harrison has a sense for Barry, Barry seems to have a sense for everybody. Where they’ve been. How he can think of them favorably.

Harrison shifts in his seat somewhat. "Forgiveness," he says, and at the sudden glimmer of trepidation in Barry’s eyes—like he thinks Harrison might trust too readily, which is, in a word, hilarious—he shakes his head. "Well, you know what they say. It’s a journey, not a destination."

Barry smiles, a gentle sympathetic smile. He peels himself away from the desk and says, "They say other stuff too, you know." He wets his lips, cocks his head to the side. "Like ... ad astra per aspera?"

A laugh startles its way out of Harrison, sudden and helpless, helplessly delighted. "Barry?"

Barry’s face splits into a grin. "Don’t get your hopes up about my language skills, it was on the Apollo 1 memorial," he says, which just makes Harrison have to take off his glasses so he can laugh harder, so he can rub his hands into his tired eyes.

And Barry’s sweet, terribly sweet, as he scrubs a hand over the back of his neck and steps closer. As he reaches down hesitantly to brush that same hand over Harrison’s forearm and squeeze.

Harrison wonders how long they can stretch this out—another year at most, probably, where Harrison can continue to look and not touch. Every day Harrison thinks he’s made his peace with the distance between them, and then every day Barry surprises him. Barry has a smile that sweeps over his eyebrows and ends somewhere in the bounce of his toes. Barry wants to impress him, astound him. Barry gave him a photo in a pharmacy frame, incongruous in the finery of his halls because it was made with love.

There’s a part of Harrison that’s sure he’ll never really get his hands on Barry Allen, not in a way that isn’t poisoned with violence or lies. And another part, equally sure, that knows there’s a good chance he’ll have crawled inside that body by next Christmas, made a new home in all that lean muscle and golden skin, fucked Barry to within an inch of his life. He wants Barry to be safe, happy, relatively unhampered in his quest for speed and strength; he wants to hear how that voice sounds when it needs.

God, just to be near him. It’s torture that Harrison wouldn’t wish on his most reviled enemies. Because they don’t deserve it. Because Harrison staked his claim with a bolt of lightning and he’s likelier to kill than to give it up. 

Harrison’s vision of the future is incomplete, except for the now and always nature of this want.

And Barry, its host and arbiter, smiles down at him. And Barry, who should have left after his shift as the Flash, turns around and heads over to the breakroom. There’s a clatter of dishes, a sweet smell in the dimly lit hall. As he puts on a new pot of coffee.


End file.
